Boffo (Barcodes from FOLIO) is a Google Sheet script for getting data about FOLIO items.
- Introduction
- Installation
- Quick start
- Usage
- Known issues and limitations
- Getting help
- Contributing
- License
- Acknowledgments
Boffo (a loose acronym of Barcodes from FOLIO, and pronounced like the noun) is an add-on for Google Sheets. Among other things, it lets you select item barcodes in a spreadsheet and retrieve information about the item records from a FOLIO server.
If you're Caltech Library staff, Boffo is available to you from the Google Marketplace for add-ons as an "Internal" add-on; if you're not Caltech Library staff, you can still install Boffo using alternate methods, as described in the pages linked below:
Once installed as an Add-on on a Google Sheet, Boffo will present itself as a menu item in the Extensions menu across the top of the sheet. Selecting the Boffo item in the Extensions menu will present several items in a submenu:
Boffo's main function is Look up barcodes in FOLIO and its use is very simple:
- Select some item barcodes in your Google spreadsheet
- Pull down the Extensions menu
- Select Look up barcodes in FOLIO from the Boffo menu
Boffo will create a new sheet titled "Item Data" in the spreadsheet where you ran it, then add the results of the item lookups to the new sheet.
If this is the first time you've used Boffo, it will first request your FOLIO account login and password in order to ask FOLIO for a token to use the network services. Boffo will store that token (and not your login or password), then proceed to look up the items whose barcodes are highlighted in the sheet. On subsequent invocations, Boffo will not ask you for FOLIO credentials unless something happens to make the token invalid (in which case, Boffo will ask you for the credentials again and generate a new token).
Please see the detailed usage section in the Boffo documentation for more information about Boffo's features and how to use them.
Depending on your account type, Boffo will run into Google quotas limiting maximum execution time. For G Suite users such as the Caltech Library, this limit is 30 minutes. For non-G Suite users, the limit is 6 minutes. At the time of this writing, Boffo can retrieve item records at a rate of about 70–100 records/second, so the 6 minute time limit will limit non-G suite users to looking up somewhere between 25,000–35,000 item records at a time.
If you find an issue, please submit it in the GitHub issue tracker for this repository.
Your help and participation in enhancing Boffo is welcome! Please visit the guidelines for contributing for some tips on getting started.
Software produced by the Caltech Library is Copyright © 2024 California Institute of Technology. This software is freely distributed under a BSD-style license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.
The vector artwork used as a starting point for the logo for this project was created by Sunarto Hamizan It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The vector graphics was modified by Mike Hucka to change the color.
The spinner used in some HTML dialogs shown by Boffo came from SVG Spinners (CSS & SMIL) by Utkarsh Verma. The code was copied on 2023-08-01 and is licensed under the MIT license by the author.
This work was funded by the California Institute of Technology Library.
